In the prior art, emergency personnel are required as a standard part of their duties to arrive and lend assistance at scenes of disaster typically involving serious injury and loss of human life. Such assistance may include searching for survivors, identifying levels of injury, removing bodies and human parts from the wreckage, and investigating the cause of a disaster. It is often critical for such assistance to be administered within a short time frame after the disaster has occurred, when the disaster scenes are the most horrific.
It is known in the art that some personnel, and especially new and inexperienced workers (also referred to herein as “rookies”), are so aghast and sickened by what they find that they cannot function nor properly perform their duties. A particularly difficult obstacle is the smell of burned human flesh, which a rookie-first responder may never have encountered before. Other odors or aromas may also be nauseating and incapacitating.
What is needed in the art is a device that can closely simulate the odors often encountered in disaster situations and a method using such a device for training first responders to experience, recognize, and withstand such aromas in a non-emergency training environment before they are exposed to actual disaster scenes.
It is a principal object of the present invention to prepare human responders for experiencing nauseating aromas in their subsequent work environment.